Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 07:48:36 PM

Login with username, password and session length

Good factual/history books about fairly grizzly subjects

Started by iamcoop, February 15, 2018, 04:41:24 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Keebleman

Quote from: LORD BAD VIBE on March 19, 2018, 01:35:36 PM
I'm glad there are some other fans of Handsome Brute on here.

I find the build up at the hotel prior to Doreen Marshall's murder especially chilling as Keebleman has already described.

As for Heath's motives, I don't suppose we will ever really know for sure. I'm quite surprised he managed to murder anyone at all given the vast quantities of booze he would sling down his throat before the act. I'd have been on the floor.

I've just finished this book.  Brilliantly researched and written, but desperately sad.  O'Connor is good at showing Heath as being more than a beast, but even so it is hard to see any mitigating circumstances to excuse his behaviour, something that Heath himself did sort of accept, though he never dropped the line that he couldn't remember the killings.

Ignatius_S

Quote from: Keebleman on May 20, 2018, 05:49:44 PM
I've just finished this book.  Brilliantly researched and written, but desperately sad.  O'Connor is good at showing Heath as being more than a beast, but even so it is hard to see any mitigating circumstances to excuse his behaviour, something that Heath himself did sort of accept, though he never dropped the line that he couldn't remember the killings.

Traditionally, Heath's motive for the murders is usually ascribed to sexually sadism and his victims were 'the vamp and the virgin'. None of which is accurate, and I felt that was something that O'Connor was trying to address.

I'm not sure that we were meant to feel any mitigating circumstances, but the section on the trial brilliantly showed how unsatisfactory the jury's options were. Indeed, the insight that one jurist (IIRC, she asked the judge three very perceptive questions and later wrote to the Home Secretary about the impossible situation that the jury felt there were in) was particularly illuminating.